low light mixes

    The Electronic Music of the 1970s series continues with a trip back to 1971. This year was a bit easier to curate than '70 because we have a few more good uses of electronic instruments featured prominently. For me, the best electronic album of 1971 is "Zero Time" by Tonto's Expanding Head Band. It's very synthetic sounding without being too cheezy. I enjoyed discovering new music for this mix...

    The theme for this mix is simple - a collection of new ambient tracks, most released within the last couple of months. Sometimes after posting a lot of theme mixes or guest mixes I need to crank out a set that is just straightforward ambient. Nothing fancy, just beautiful, drifting music to ease the mind. Here are some links to the music used in this mix: https://kramer.bandcamp.com/album/bapt...

    A few months ago I stumbled across two tunes called "Lonely Satellite" & "The Lonely Orbit." Those titles intrigued me and I thought they would make a great theme for a mix. I started collecting tracks, not knowing when the mix would come to fruition.  Then this past week I heard the new album from Alva Noto called "Kinder der Sonne (From "Komplizen")" and I knew immediately that I had to make...

    Two guest mixes in a row - I am a lucky guy! This one comes to us from LLM regular contributor, Paul Asbury Seaman. It's a great collection of instrumental tracks that, as the title says, leans heavily on music from the 70s. My brain has been stuck in the 70s for a while as I collect tunes for the Electronic Music of the 70s series(1971 is coming soon). So I was excited about the coincidence o...

  This is a repost of an old mix from 2009. The is a retro synth mix with a sort of old space program vibe. I realized that I'd never posted it to Mixcloud so I thought I would haul it out of space dock and update it with a few more cuts added to the end. It's great to hear tracks from Freescha, Lunar Testing Lab, Bochum Welt and others for the first time in a long time. Enjoy this trip backward a...

    I've done a couple mixes featuring library music from the 70s & 80s that have the vibe of a cheesy deep sea exploration documentary. I've always wanted to do a follow up and here it is. One of the problems is that I didn't check the tracklist from the last mix and so quite a few tracks from that set made it into this one. When I figured out what had happened, it was too late to change. Well, a...

    This mix is pretty straightforward - it's a collection of tracks from some of my favorite ambient albums of 2023. The first three tracks are probably my top three albums of the year so far and I expect them to be on my year-end list in December. There's not much else to say, just sit back and enjoy some excellent ambient music. Cheers!   T R A C K L I S T : 00:00    Rod Modell & Taka Noda - Un...

    The Plan - make a mix for every year of the 70s, featuring electronic music from each year. Easy peasy! Well, not exactly. The early years are a bit tough. Electronic music wasn't really a genre yet. There are definitely electronic albums. But enough to fill an hour-long mix? Maybe...sort of. So let me start by saying that some folks may disagree with my choices as I tried to fill out the trac...

    I love making shortwave mixes, so it's hard to believe it's been almost 11 years since my last new shortwave creation. Yikes! I know these mixes are labor intensive and I am a terrible procrastinator but I am shocked that it's been that long. Here are the previous mixes: https://lowlightmixes.blogspot.com/2007/04/drift-on-signal.html https://lowlightmixes.blogspot.com/2008/06/ghost-in-phase.ht...

    Another musical great has left this world. Ryuichi Sakamoto was a founding member of Yellow Magic Orchestra. He became well known for his neo-classical work, his collaborations, and of course his film scores, from Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence to The Revenant to the Oscar-winning score for The Last Emperor. The solo piano version of Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence is one of my favorite piano piece...

    International Piano Day is March 29th and, as has been the case for the last five years, I've put together a new mix in celebration of ambient piano tunes. I don't do quite as many piano mixes as I once did but when I create these Piano Day sets I find I really enjoy the vibe. There are a lot of new tracks in the mix, half of them from 2022 & 2023. But there are a few older tunes as well. I re...

    Blade Runner is obviously one of the great sci-fi films of all time, with one of the best soundtracks of all time. As a testament to the staying power of Vangelis' work, we still have a artists today that mimic the sound of the Blade Runner score. The recording that got me started on this mix is brand new from Crows Labyrinth called "Neon Scenes I: Granular Dreams". It's a longform generative...

Maurice Martenot with his invention   Last year in my Halloween mix I included a track that used an instrument called the Ondes Martenot. I new a little bit about it - that it was an old instrument played with a ring on a wire. But that was all I really knew. Then a listener pointed me in the direction of a piece for the Ondes Martenot written in 1937. Yikes, 1937?! I had no idea that "Oraison" by...

A couple of tunes were the inspiration for cranking out another Sunday Morning mix. First is the lead-off track - A Sunday Kind of Love from Etta James. It's simply a great tune that I'm surprised I haven't used before. Next is an track from 1971 that I'd never heard of until a few weeks ago. I stumbled on an Instagram reel that talked about the gentle beauty of "Curry Rice" by Kenji Endo. I immed...

    Hmmm, what kind of mix do you think this one might be. I believe the gaudy cover art gives it away. This is essentially a continuation of my "Simply Ambient" series. A nice, straightforward mix of new ambient tunes. I got tired of coming up with variations of "simply ambient" such as absolutely ambient, purely ambient, totally ambient, etc. So I decided to ripoff the over-the-top "Now That's W...

    This mix started with the track "Light & Grace" by Schneider TM. When I heard it I was reminded about how much I like the sound of a vocoder. I also realized that I never did a follow-up to the the vocoder mix I did all the way back in 2010 - http://lowlightmixes.blogspot.com/2010/10/vox-electronix.html So here is a new collection of vocoder tunes. I'm not sure how many of these tracks actuall...

    Fire up the Epstein Drive, get settled in your crash couch and set forth on a tour of the solar system. We'll travel from the sun past the inner planets and through asteroid belt out to the gas giants, into the kuiper belt and oort cloud, and finally reaching interstellar space. All the track titles make it clear where we are on this journey. Incidentally, there is a comet, C/2022 E3, that hop...

    This mix is much more straightforward than the Antarctica set. This mix follows my "dubby & dreamy" formula of ethereal ambient dub tracks with a few gentle beats and lots of synth washes. Here are the links to all the music used in this mix:   https://richiehawtin.bandcamp.com/album/consumed-in-key https://ultimae.bandcamp.com/album/onwards-system https://ultimae.bandcamp.com/album/isolated h...

  A couple of years ago I watched and read a ton on Ernest Shackleton, the English Explorer who went to Antarctica 3 times. One of those was a journey that saw his ship, Endurance, get stuck in the ice and then crushed by the ice, leaving the crew of 27 adrift on an ice floe. After 6 months of drifting they made their way in the ship's boats to Elephant Island. Shackleton and five crewmates set sa...

    I usually listen to jazz at work while doing some computer maintenance or slogging through emails. I don't keep as close track of standout albums like I do with ambient and indie. So this is a collection of tracks that I happened to enjoy this year and of course they had to fit with the vibe of the whole mix. My top 5 jazz albums are: Charles Lloyd - Trio Of Trios Makaya McCraven - In These Ti...

    I can't decide which of these Best Ambient mixes I like the most. Oh well, I guess I'll just have to listen all 3 all day, every day until the end of the year. Then the journey starts all over again. As another year comes to a close, it's hard to believe I've been at this for 17 years. Yikes! I'm not sure how long I'll keep creating these mix but I at least have to make it to 20 years, right?...

    Not much to say other than here is Best Ambient 2022 part 2.  Cheers!   T R A C K L I S T : 00:00    Snufmumriko - Langt under noll (Radio Mnemosyne - Dronarivm) 06:10    Heavenchord - Field Recordings #19(Field Recordings #4 - Secret Domain) 12:00    Austin Rockman - Muter (Our Own Unknown - Krysalisound) 13:27    Alio Die - Il Lievito Dell'anima (Distillation Of Time - Hic Sunt Leones) 18:25...

    Man, these lists are tough to assemble. So why do I does this? Mostly because I enjoy the exercise of reviewing the tons and tons of music that is released over the year. It's a more active and intentional listening mode that I switch to at this time of year. I love checking out other lists to see what I may have missed. But mostly I'm just a music dork who likes lists. So here it is my favori...

    I have been a casual fan of Manuel Gottsching for a long time but I never really dug into his discography until the last few days with the news of his passing. I don't have time to write much about him so I'll cut & paste a few things from Pitchfork. "Manuel Gottsching, the Ash Ra Tempel bandleader who went on to compose the electronic cornerstone album E2-E4, died last Sunday (December 4). Gö...

photo by Paul Asbury Seaman This is the perfect mix to offset the hustle & bustle of the holiday season. Skip the shopping and make some tea and chill the f*** out to this wonderful meditation mix from Paul Asbury Seaman. Here's what Paul says: "Native American flutes. A bit of Ireland, a bit of acoustic guitar (with echoes of India), interspersed with Tibetan bells, wind chimes, and a recent trac...